All nationalisms contain the capacity for genocide. If you truly love your people and are willing to do anything to keep them safe, you are willing to make war on their enemies. The stronger your in-group identity, the more likely you are to have negative views of outsiders.
These are rules of social identity. They are apply to Jews and to Nazis and to communists and to Muslims and to blacks and to whites.
All groups are engaged in a fierce struggle for survival. They are competing for scarce resources such as women, power, money, land, water, etc.
Your group is either growing stronger and dominating others or it is getting weaker and getting dominated by others. You’re either colonizing or being colonized.
All victimologies fuel nationalism. Holocaust Remembrance Day is a key part of Jewish nationalism.
“Extremism” is a cheap put-down used by those who don’t like a particular group getting stronger in their in-group identity. “Jewish extremism” refers to Jews who are extremely strong in their Jewish identity, and therefore more likely to hate those who are threats to Jews. “White extremism” refers to whites who are extremely strong in their white identity, and therefore more likely to hate those who are threats to whites. “Islamic extremism” refers to Muslims who are extremely strong in their Muslim identity, and therefore more likely to hate those who are a threat to Islam. “Christian extremism” refers to Christians who are extremely strong in their Christian identity, and therefore more likely to hate those who are threats to Christianity.
There’s nothing particularly complicated or difficult here. As Israel becomes more nationalist, more Israelis will yell “Death to the Arabs.” As Americans become more nationalist, they will become more vocal in their hatred of those threatening their America.
JJ Goldberg is one of my favorite Jewish writers on the left.
JJ Goldberg writes: What on earth could have possessed the second-in-command of Israel’s armed forces to kick off Yom Hashoah, the national Holocaust remembrance day, with a May 4 speech likening Israel today to Germany on the eve of World War II?
There are two possible answers. As it happens, one is correct and the other isn’t.
On one hand, we could say that the general, deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, didn’t actually say that, or that he expressed himself poorly or wasn’t thinking clearly or was taken out of context, or that his timing was wrong.
That’s the tone taken by the army’s General Staff in a statement put out the next morning, after cabinet ministers, politicians and others accused Golan of aiding Israel’s enemies by labeling Israeli soldiers as Nazis: The general “had no intention to compare IDF and the State of Israel to processes that took place in Germany 70 years ago. The comparison is absurd and has no basis, and I had no intention to create such parallels or criticize the political leadership. The IDF is a moral army that protects the purity of arms and human dignity.”
That seems clear enough. But it doesn’t quite square with the general’s actual words. Take this one example from his speech: “The Holocaust in my eyes must bring us to deep contemplation of the nature of man, even when that man is myself. The Holocaust must bring us to deep contemplation on the matter of the responsibility of leadership, on the matter of the quality of a society.” No intention to criticize the political leadership? Really?
And this: “If there’s anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is identifying some horrifying processes that took place in Europe in general and in particularly Germany up to 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding evidence of their repetition here in our society today in 2016. It is easier and simpler to hate a person. It is easy and simple to arouse fear, to scare-monger. It is easy to become dehumanized, callous, sanctimonious.” (My translation.)
Boiled down to its essence, the army’s “clarification” is essentially an extended version of one of Yogi Berra ’s most trenchant epigrams: “I really didn’t say all the things I said.”
On the other hand, you could say that Major General Golan knew exactly what he was saying and when and where he was saying it. You’d go on to say that this was the latest and most eye-popping in a string of critiques voiced by the heads of Israel’s security forces against the country’s current political leadership and the direction in which it’s leading Israel. You’d note that the deputy chief of staff was not winging it but reading from a prepared text (watch the video here ), and that it’s inconceivable that he’d give a major speech without running it past his boss. There was no gaffe.
If our second explanation is correct, then his timing was correct and even necessary. Taken as a whole, we’d say, his speech was a public call for a fundamental change in the way Israel relates to the Holocaust, and to itself.
In this view, the Holocaust was not only the mass murder that snuffed out the lives of 6 million Jews. It was that, and that must never be forgotten. But it was also the process by which a great nation lost its moral bearings and slid into collective madness.
Looked at that way, Golan’s reference to “70, 80 and 90 years” makes sense. Ninety years ago, 1926, was the beginning of Germany’s descent, with mobs of fascist bullies roaming the streets, attacking socialists, liberals, journalists and Jews while the nation looked on, defeated, frustrated, angry and yearning to become great again. Eighty years ago, in 1936, Germans watched and cheered as their tough new government enforced the just-enacted Nuremberg race laws and marched troops into the demilitarized Rhineland. Seventy years ago, in 1946, Germans were again defeated and again denying responsibility.
With his “70, 80 and 90 years” Golan isn’t groping for the right number. He’s presenting a cautionary timeline.
No, Israel is not Nazi Germany and its soldiers are not Nazis. They’re not rounding up every Palestinian they can find and stuffing them into ovens. That notion is indeed absurd. On the contrary, Israelis are under attack and doing their best to defend themselves and their nation. But in the background, Golan detects what he called “early signs” — nitzanim in Hebrew — and they worry him.
As he made clear, he wants Israel and Israelis to recognize how their place as Jews in the world has changed. They are still beset by enemies. But they are also a powerful nation that can affect its own circumstances and those of others around them by the decisions they make. They must stop thinking of themselves only as victims and begin to understand themselves also as actors. If they don’t, they’re in danger of sliding down that same slippery slope and becoming perpetrators.
In his most radical assertion, Golan called for a dramatic transformation in the nature of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. At present it is a day to contemplate what Nazi Germany did to Jews. Analogies may be drawn, but only when they extend to the evils others have done to Jews, other ways in which Jews have been victimized. Now, three generations after the Holocaust, when Jews have achieved their own power in their own nation-state, Golan wants the day to become an opportunity for Israelis to think further, to consider what they themselves might do to others. He called for Yom Hashoah to become a national day of “soul-searching.”
“On Yom Hashoah,” Golan said, “we will talk about our ability to uproot from our midst the early signs of intolerance, of self-destruction on the path toward moral deterioration. In effect, Yom Hashoah is an opportunity for soul-searching. Yom Kippur is a day of individual soul-searching. It is fitting and even essential that Yom Hashoah be, in addition, a day of national soul-searching.”
